Best Card for Points in EVERY Category

In this video, I want to give you the best credit card to earn the maximum amount of points in each common spending category. So you're able to earn some serious amounts of points to use for free travel. We did this video for cashback a couple of years ago, analyzing a guy's setup that he shared on Reddit that allows him to earn 5% back on everything. Well, this time we will be doing it with points. And in some categories, we will earn well over five points per dollar. Hey, credit warriors, welcome to the show. My name is Ben Hedges, aka The Credit Shofu. And on this channel, we cover U.S. credit cards, personal finance and luxury travel. If you like the sound of that, please subscribe. And this video is brought to you by Max Rewards. But more on that later. Now, we will be looking at transferable points only in this video, not cashback, not hotel points or airline miles. That is because transferable points are generally considered the most valuable, with major points currencies like ChaseUR Points, Amex Membership Rewards Points, Citi Thank You Points and Capital One Miles all being worth around two cents per point, according to the points guy. So picking the cards with the highest multipliers in transferable points should give you the highest value overall. I'm going to go through the most popular spending categories, and I found cards that earned the highest rates in each. For your info, we will not include any cards that you cannot apply for anymore. So you're not going to see the Citi Custom Cash here, for example, even though it gets you five points per dollar in many categories, if that is your highest spending category for the month. But we're not going to include it. Some categories we will split into regular and restricted version of the category, like airfare with airlines direct and airfare through a portal. OK, we'll give you options for both of those. And five points per dollar is kind of the magic number. OK, we're going to be aiming to be at five points per dollar for all of them with some categories. We're actually able to do better than five and some we fall slightly short. So let's start with gas. So for gas spending, the best credit card out there that earns a high multiplier of transferable points is the Amex Business Gold. It earns four points per dollar on your biggest two spending categories per month from this list. And obviously, you can see that gas is on there. So if you make sure gas is one of your two biggest spending categories for the month, you will be earning four points per dollar back. Now, I want to address an elephant in the room. This is a business card. What if you don't have a business? Well, business cards from Amex and Chase are easy to get. You don't even need an LLC, a company you can apply with your own Social Security number. And normally, you don't have to provide any evidence of business activity. If you're a contractor like an Uber driver or someone in the building industry who charges per job, OK, then that is a legit business. All right. You can apply for these. So I will include some business cards from Amex and Chase in this. Technically, you're only supposed to use them for business spending. But who's checking? Like, I can say what I want now that the credit card companies don't partner with me anymore. For gas, there is currently a card that does better than this, though, and that is just for this quarter. Let's look at that now. That card is the Chase Freedom Flex or the old Freedom. If you still have that, this card pays out five points per dollar. Yes, they do market it as cash back. But as long as you have a Chase Sapphire or chasing preferred card to transfer it to, it becomes points. So I'm going to call it points. So the card pays five points per dollar on one thousand five hundred dollars worth of spending in categories that change each quarter. Here are the categories for quarter three of twenty twenty six. And what do you notice? Yes, gas is one of them. It's limited to one thousand five hundred dollars in three months. But I doubt most people will spend over five hundred dollars per month on gas. So that should cover you for the whole quarter. Then you can go back to using the Amex business gold. Let's move on to our next category. Transit. This is basically all other transportation other than airfare. Actually, no, it probably doesn't include that cruise that you went on. What? So normally it's ground transportation like taxis, Ubers, trains, subways, etc. And again, the Amex business gold offers four points per dollar on transit if it's one of your two biggest spending categories for the month. So with that card, if you use it mainly for transit and gas in those two, you will earn four points per dollar. Let's now move on to our next category, airfare. This is a big one. But first, if you're serious about getting every little bit of value out of your rewards credit cards, you've got to check out the app Max Rewards. Not only does it show you your balances, transactions, points and rewards balances across all your cards, even if they're from different issuers. So you can see everything in one app, but it also incorporates really useful features like the card value tracker, where you can clearly see the value you got back in a year versus the annual fee. You can see it on my Amex gold. We have the value of the points I earned, the offers I redeemed and the credits I used in the most recent update. They've redesigned the benefits page to give you a very clear picture of your coupon book style credits. You can browse across all your cards like the Amex Dunkin credit, the Lululemon credit. You can even see your spend progress towards a free night on the Hilton card. So it's very easy to see where you can maximize value and where you missed out. Look, I forgot to use my Amex dining credit in April. And that's exactly what the credit card companies want you to do. Forget about these benefits and let them reset the next month. So you lose them. This really lets you outsmart the corporations. In addition, the offers page still lets you search your offers across all of your cards from different banks. There's the for you tab, which finds offers that are appropriate for you based on your past spending. The popular tab showing you offers popular with Max Rewards users and the value tab showing you the offers where you can get the most cash back or rewards. And these are offers from all your banks. Look, here's an Amex one and the next one is a Chase one. Max Rewards will also activate all your offers for you so you never miss a deal. Some of these are premium features and require Max Rewards gold, but you can get a free trial and then a three month discount after the trial ends with my link below. Or if you download it directly from the app store, use code Ben when you sign up for the same deal. There are also free features on the app that you can try out as well. So for airfare, we will use an old favorite, the Amex Platinum, which pays you five points per dollar on flights on up to $500,000 in spend per year. This is really significant. I remember spending about $10,000 on some business class flights to the UK a couple of years ago and getting 50,000 points back. That's like getting a welcome bonus on a mid-tier credit card. And at two cents per point, that is worth $1,000. So this really is useful since air tickets are one spending area where you may spend a lot of money in one go and you suddenly get a huge windfall of points. But it is possible to get an even higher multiplier on airfare if you are willing to book through a bank's portal. And that is with the Chase Sapphire Reserve. This card gives you eight points per dollar on everything booked through Chase Travel, which obviously includes airfare. The bank can do this because they're getting a cut of the price since they are marketing the air ticket. So they're just sharing some of that profit with you in addition to sharing the transaction fee with you. Some other cards also offer higher rates through their portals, but the CSR is the best for airfare. Let's now move on to our next category. Hotels. Now, if you're booking hotels directly, normally it makes more sense to get that particular hotel chain's card. Like even the mid-tier Hilton Surpass card, for example, gives you 12 Hilton points per dollar for Hilton spend. Hilton points are worth less, though. The IHG Premier card from Chase gives you 26 points per dollar at IHG. Ten of those are just for being a member of the loyalty program, though, so actually you only really count 16 points per dollar. And they are worth less than transferable points. But we're not going to need to do that math today because in this video we are only talking about transferable points. But just be aware when booking hotels direct, hotels own co-branded credit cards can be very competitive. But if you want to earn transferable points booking hotels directly, the same card we use for airfare through the portal, the Chase Sapphire Reserve, actually offers four points per dollar on hotels booked directly. That is the best multiplier you can get for a direct booking. If you want to book a hotel and you're okay with using a bank's portal, then you can actually earn a lot more points. The City Strata Elite, which was refreshed earlier this year, or was it last year? It was refreshed recently anyway. It actually earns 12 City Thank You points per dollar on hotels booked through City Travel. If you value the points at around two cents per point, that is a 24% return on your spend, which is crazy. You get that rate on car rentals and attractions too, but I would say hotels is the larger spend category. All right, let's move on to our next one. Dining. So for dining, there is a clear winner, and that is the Amex Gold personal version, not the business one. You can earn four points per dollar at restaurants worldwide on up to $50,000 in spending per year. That's a great return and a limit most people would never hit, but it is possible to get an even higher points multiplier on dining if you jump through some hoops. The first one of these is with the City Strata Elite again. It will give you six points per dollar at restaurants, but only on Friday and Saturday nights, which to be honest, are the nights that a lot of people would go out to a restaurant on since there's no work the next day for most people. Then another option for six points per dollar is the Bilt Obsidian card, which gives you three points per dollar on either dining or grocery you choose, but you might be wondering, wait a minute, three points per dollar isn't competitive, but with Bilt on the first of every month, they do rent day where your point earning rates double just for one day. So if you dine at a restaurant on the first of the month, that would be six points per dollar. You can also increase it with the Bilt dining program as well, which gives you like another three points per on either the Bilt card or any card. I'll put a link to it down below. You can check it out. So yeah, you have to jump through some hoops. The City one is going to be easier to use since you get two nights every week and the Bilt one is just one day a month, but the City card's annual fee is higher. All right, let's move on to grocery. The Amex Gold wins this one at four points per dollar on up to $25,000 spent each year at US supermarkets. This card is an old favorite of mine. I use it all the time. But if you wanted six points per dollar for one day of the month, I guess you could also get the Bilt Obsidian card, pick grocery instead of dining, and then on rent day, you'd get six points per dollar on the first of every month. All right, what's our next category? Internet, cable and phone. OK, so for this one, we're going to go with the Chase Inc. Cash. It's a card that we haven't mentioned yet. It is a business card, but it gives you five points per dollar on Internet, cable and phone bills and also a few other things on up to $25,000 spent in those categories per year. This is rare to be able to get five points per dollar on these categories. Just FYI, you will need an Inc. Preferred or a Sapphire card to redeem the points as you are points or transfer them out to airlines. If you just have the card alone, you can only redeem for cash back or through the travel portal at one cent per point. This card also currently has a $1,000 slash 100,000 point welcome bonus. I'll put a link to that down below somewhere if you're interested. OK, now let's look at our final category, which is actually not a category at all. It is the everything else category, non-category spend. So for non-category spend, if you want to earn points and there are cars like the Robin Hood Gold card that give you three percent on everything, but that is cash back, not points. So if you want to earn points, the Capital One Venture or Venture X cards offer the If you want something mid-range, get the Venture. But if you want a card with like airport lounge access, car rental status, global entry, all that kind of stuff, go for the Venture X, which does have a higher annual fee, but it's great value. So if you make up a wallet with all these cards, you will be earning the maximum in every common spend category in the form of points. Only issue is the annual fees. You don't really want to have the Amex Platinum, Chase Sapphire Reserve and the Citi Strata Elite. Those three alone would cost you $2,285 altogether in annual fees. Add on the Venture X and that's another $400. So you'd be looking at like $2,600 or more. So I would definitely look at where you spend the most and pick the cards that actually make sense for you. Sometimes picking a card with a lower multiplier on a certain category like 3X, for example, instead of 5X that has a $95 annual fee instead of like an $800 annual fee would make sense over having the premium option for that category if you don't have that much spend in the category anyway. All right, guys, that's the video for today. Thank you so much for watching. Leave your comments below. If you want a free trial of Max Rewards Gold and then a three-month discount when the trial ends, click the link below or use code BEN if you download it through the app store directly. Please subscribe to our channel if you're new. We'll see you next time. Bye-bye.